Management at Apache Canada, a leading independent oil and gas exploration and development company, wasn’t happy with the supervisory control on their current well sites located in Northern Canada. To further complicate issues, Apache Canada needed to expand their SCADA system from the existing 70 well sites to add another nine new well sites. The main issue operators faced was that the current system slowed down the round-robin polling, taking up to five minutes to confirm written values to the Emerson FloBoss RTUs at the well sites. To alleviate this problem and increase the polling sequence, Apache Canada contracted IMV Projects to integrate a solution. The solution included using MatrikonOPC as the technology to provide the connectivity between the RTUs and the SCADA host.

Bart Nelissen, Control Systems Specialist with IMV Projects, integrated Emerson FloBoss RTUs at nine new well sites. Each RTU was connected to the central Intellution iFIX SCADA Host via wireless MDS 4710B radios using the MatrikonOPC Server for Intellution iFIX. "OPC is so much more efficient than the current communication protocol being used," says Nelissen. "OPC enables more data to be displayed, and still polls well sites more frequently than with the current communication set-up."

Integration went smoothly. Since OPC is plug-and-play technology, no integration support was required from MatrikonOPC. Currently only 14 points are connected at each of the new well sites, but performance has improved significantly compared to the existing well sites. Once thorough testing is complete, more points will be added without fear of dragging down the system.